Heroes of The Information Technology Business

I never used to understand the comic strip Dilbert. And now I am married to him. My husband works in the world of Information Technology (IT for all of you technology slang gurus), and sometimes it seems as if he is employed by a different planet. While most people want private offices, he greatly enjoys the engineers’ bull pen set up with their computers and desks all near each other. While others get impatient waiting for their email to load, he can sit there for hours working on making the numbers and chips fall right into place. I don’t understand it. I never will.

Coffee houses are a necessity in order to be fully awake by 9am and browsing at the local electronics store is considered a lunch break. Pens leak in your shirt pocket, but you hold more of a concern for saving the pen than salvaging the shirt. Your “friends” are often people you have never actually met in “real” life. Who has time? You are sitting at your computer! Again.

You instant message the people 5 feet away from you, and you check your MySpace every day. But even more so, you are usually responsible for helping your semi-real friends with THEIR space on the web because you are internet savvy. You become people’s world wide web whore.

You think YOUR job is stressful? Try being responsible for a network of 30 plus computers and then when the connection crashes, you are the only one who can fix it. Suddenly the office break room being out of coffee doesn’t seem like your biggest problem.

Chances are you will work for a dot com, and that means that the chances are even more likely that your job security is about as stable as a city resting on a major fault line. It is a wobbly world of lay offs, promotions, and constant demands for better and more advanced education & experience.

My husband loves what he does, but part of me is so fascinated as to why. How can someone be in such a stressful environment and yet still completely thrive and strive to succeed? You IT folk absolutely fascinate me. I have to google the most basic of terminology when something goes awry with my computer, and people who work in IT are the ones that WRITE the content for google?

IT workers, I salute you. You are the soldiers of the information super highway. The phenoms of networking and tech support. There is a quality about you that separates you from the rest of the world and yet at the same time you are the ones that keep the world going as we know it.

I still don’t understand the Dilbert cartoons very often. The humor is way over my head. But I am grateful for the chances I’ve gotten to be married to a member of your secret computer controlled society. I love how the world is different. And how through IT you help us to have a chance to communicate and work together.